Above is a sneak peek at the video we created for our upcoming Kickstarter fundraising campaign for Speakeasy. Look forward to the fundraiser being launched in a little over a week. Meanwhile you can now already watch the video Stolis Hadjicharalambous and Henry Borriello shot and Stolis edited for us. They did a great job!

Also, Speakeasy now also has its own Facebook page you can go to and “like.” One more way to keep in touch with all the Speakeasy news and articles, which will be coming in faster and furiouser, or rather curious and curiouser, now that we have a reading just around the corner (Dec 7) and the full out showcase around the next (Feb/Mar 2016).

For example, we recently concluded our first round of auditions with another round slated for December.

Why two rounds of auditions? Three reasons. We have a big diverse cast with lots of idiosyncratic roles to fill, in leads and supporting. We needed to focus first on filling the parts we needed cast for the December 7 reading, for which we required about half the expected company of performers; but we were lucky to find some great performers who will also join us at the showcase next year if not yet at the reading. (More painfully, there were also those wonderful talents we couldn’t cast because they were up for the same part as another wonderful talent, but only one person could fill that role.) And finally, just how many more actors (and musicians) we will be able to include in the ensemble will depend in part on how successful our fundraising campaign ends up being.

We are hoping for a large, eccentrically diverse cast of many shapes, colors, personalities and talents. We are already far along towards that goal, but we hope to cast far more wonderfully unique artists. And so we plan to hold additional auditions in December. But there is a budget to consider. With each performer you not only have to consider how their hire effects the personnel budget, but also the costume budget and the stationary budget. (Stationary budget? Sound silly? Having just made copies of hundreds of pages of music each for over a dozen performers, the producer in me is currently cursing the composer in me for his excessive musical output! Did Act Two really have to be nearly through-composed? Well, yes!)

I’m very enthusiastic about the performers we’ve engaged so far and very excited about adding more colorful talent to the ensemble. The video above and the Kickstarter campaign it will anchor are a big part of making that all happen.